


God is Dead

by EavingMal



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, God - Freeform, Necromancy, Postgrads, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-08-07 05:03:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7701844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EavingMal/pseuds/EavingMal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylie, Postmortem Studies postgrad without a thesis topic, thinks Neitzsche may have the solution to her studying woes</p>
            </blockquote>





	God is Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, all.
> 
> Drabble written for a friend based on a Tumblr post. Please do not expect an accurate representation of Neitzche or, indeed, logical consistency beyond the very basic amount necessary to make the story hang together.
> 
> Please enjoy.

“Would you like sugar with that, ma’am?”

Kylie had to take a moment before she felt up to answering that civilly. “No, thanks.”

Lady, I just walked into your coffee shop and ordered “a long black in the largest cup you’re legally allowed to sell me”. I’m pretty sure at least three guys on the way here have been about to offer to beat up my boyfriend, the bags under my eyes are that dark. My skin colour is so pale and grey that the last corpse I reanimated asked if I’d donated my body to the university, too.  
_Do I fucking look like I want my coffee tainted?_

Kylie paid for her coffee with the closest approximation of a polite smile she could manage. Her phone beeped. She pulled it out and turned the screen on. New e-mail from work.

Sorry to inform you … moving to another university!? No other research assistant positions available in Postmortem Studies at this time!?  
GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR FUTURE JOB SEARCHING??

As soon as the coffee arrived, Kylie gulped down half of it, not really caring about burning her mouth. It was gone by the time she’d walked back to campus. She wasn’t sure if it had actually woken her up any, but she could definitely feel her heart hammering and her eyeballs vibrating.  
 _It’s alright_ , she told herself. _200 metres of undergrads and I’ll be in the lab._  
What did undergrads even do on campus on the weekends. Seriously.

Oh.  
Oh no.  
Pamphlets.

The boy handing them out looked about twelve (alright, maybe eighteen, but that was pushing it!) and was dressed like one of the Temporal Studies students needed a case study in eyeliner from the 2002.

“God is Dead and we killed him!” he shouted, waving the pamphlet at her.  
She put up a hand to wave him away, but he shoved a pamphlet into it. “Come to the meeting tonight!” he said.  
She gave him what she hoped was a noncommittal nod, and shoved the pamphlet into her bag.  
In the lab, she found her area and threw her bag down next to it. Michael kept strictly to Church Sundays (why he was a necromancer if he was so concerned about offending God was a mystery to Kylie, but it made him happy). Danni would still be sleeping; they never arrived anywhere before noon on weekends. Georgie was taking a writing week, and Archie just plain hadn’t been seen since the second week of semester. So the lab was all hers.

She put her head down on the desk. A year and a half into her degree and she still didn’t really have a clue what her dissertation was going to be about. One more thesis topic found in an experimental journal from 1983 that no-one remembered by damn it, it was enough to crush her dreams of finally having a research topic. Come on, she was a necromancer! Raising the dead was, like, demolishing the last bastion of humanity before the knowledge of the eternal! The field couldn’t possibly be out of unresearched topics!  
Maybe she should take Michael up on his offer of going to Church next weekend. He was actually some sort of mythical beast who was graduating on time (even most of the literal magical creatures in postgrad didn’t manage that). It _had_ to be divine intervention.

Divine …  
She pulled the pamphlet out of her bag.  
It was a terrible pamphlet, definitely the work of the one student in the club who vaguely remembered that Publisher was part of the Office suite. The title was “GOD IS DEAD” in an all-caps font, with a tiny attribution underneath to Friedrich Neitzche.  
Inside, it informed Kylie that this week’s discussion was on the concept of modern morality and the role of society. But there it was, at the top of every page. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”  
Kylie folded the pamphlet up carefully. It would be a project and a half. But she was desperate. Wasn’t it at least worth a shot?

~

“Look,” Kylie said to the circle of blank faces around her. “Just a couple of questions, then I’ll get out of your hair, I promise. I just have to know – is this quote literal or metaphorical?” She pointed to the big quote on the top of the pamphlet.  
“Well,” someone answered hesitantly. “That depends on what you mean by literal. I mean, it doesn’t mean a literal god who literally lived and literally died. It’s more a provocative sentence intended to make people think about …”  
“So, what you’re telling me is that there’s not, say, a corpse out there somewhere,” Kylie said.  
“Um,” the professor leading the discussion said, “What did you say your faculty was, again?”  
Kylie packed up her notebook.  
Alright, it hadn’t been a _foolproof_ plan.  
“Thanks anyway,” she said. “That’s all I needed. Have a good chat.”  
She forced herself to close the door behind her before dropping her forehead onto the wall next to it. Stupid. Stupid, stupid. Why? She should have guessed. It was a Philosophy meeting.  
Although.  
There was a whole department of Psychopomp Studies. Hell, she knew the bar where all the High Priests and Priestesses of the Theology faculty hung out.  
They didn’t all have to be right. Only one of them had to be.  
She poked her head around the door again. “Hi. Sorry. Last question. Theoretically speaking – entirely hypothetically – what God would you say is most likely to have, say, severe allergies?”


End file.
